Elsewhere USA by Dalton Conley

Elsewhere USA is confusing, failed attempt at social critcism

STEVEN E. ALFORD |
April 12, 2009

Attention, intraviduals. Yes, you many-selved people out there, somewhere in your (n)office. Your convestment seems out of control, no doubt owing to the fact that “we are all artists now.” That is, if you are a member of the Elsewhere class, and not one of the nowhere men, the latter who are apparently incapable of engaging in dynamic polygamy. Or you could be a member of the ungroup.

If any of this makes any sense, thank that two-by-four to the forehead, not the contents of Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, USA, an exercise in sociological free-association that seeks, but fails, to say anything concrete about society somewhere sometime.

Conley claims, “changes in three areas of our lives—the economy, the family, and technology—have combined to alter the social world and give birth to a new type of American professional … the intravidual [who] has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously.” (Isn’t he describing a mother of twins?)

This intravidual is a member of the Elsewhere class, the top third of earners, “lawyers with young kids at home, and investment bankers, and public relations consultants, and advertising executives, and yes, overpaid CEOs.” Apparently, the more these people earn, the more they work, upsetting the traditional idea of leisure-class elites. Also, they “change partners more than they change locations.”

They live in the Elsewhere society, “where not only have physical boundaries become less important, where not only do many of us function with split-screen attentions (becoming, in essence, a collection of intraviduals), but where social boundaries dissolve, leaving us in a new cultural landscape without a map or guidebook.”

Do you live here? Do I? I have no idea (lacking, I guess, the relevant map/guidebook). The reason I’m confused is that there is a fundamental problem with Elsewhere’s argument. After identifying the Elsewhere class in the introduction, in the first chapter he switches to “we,” “us,” and “Mr. and Mrs.” [!] Elsewhere, suggesting that he’s speaking to a broad swath of readers, not just those he earlier identified as earning more than $200K a year.

This raises the question of exactly what and whom he is describing in the Elsewhere society—the wealthy or a much broader group. If the latter—and it seems he’s going for a larger reader demographic—then the terms of the argument he sets up at the beginning just don’t work, shuttling as it does between descriptions of the hard-working, high-flying Elsewhere class and “us,” constantly conflating the author/reader “us” with Mr. and Mrs. Elsewhere.

The book is filled with interesting statistics and observations — about the history of air conditioning, the origin of New York loft culture, etc. — as well as the one required trip that apparently comes with every book contract: a flight out to the west coast to gawk at Google. (No free peanuts on the flight out but free food at Google. Hmmmm. I sense a trendy notion coming on.) But for every McNugget of observation, we find that “we” now “circulate like electrons clouds through the networks of love and human connection.” What?

To call the book’s prose “breezy” would be akin to calling a hurricane windy. On any given page, it seems that an Encyclopedia of Sociology has exploded and we are sifting through the remains. All the usual suspects appear — C. Wright Mills, Weber, Milgram, Goffman, Shills — but they are presented adrift from their important historical and social context, applied at will to the present moment, picked up and put down like so many discarded Legos.

For example, Conley explains Marx’s four types of alienation — no doubt helpful to many readers — and claims that intraviduals are alienated. But then it’s on to the next topic. Wait: If a postmodern person is alienated, how does that compare to the modernist figure who was the object of Marx’s analysis? And apparently one of the marks of an intravidual is his/her internationalism: Identity is no longer a function of place and space. But what of Marx’s proletariat, which was international by definition? What’s the difference in the two types of internationalism? Apparently “nowhere men” are “the necessary, dialectic complement to the Elsewhere class,” an observation not made until page 131, and dropped again without elaboration. The author then talks about rational taxation schemes, the monetization of the Internet and other bubbly topics only peripherally, if at all, related to his subject.

Along the way, Conley indulges in his penchant for neologisms, as the first paragraph suggests. Of course, sociology abounds in them as a means of fixing a concept for further examination, such as the useful and justly famous Organization Man. But I must confess, by the time I got to weisure (some sort of combination of work and leisure) I was looking around for the Puddy Tat.

After 200 pages of claims about how we got from someplace — the era of the Organization Man? the nineteenth century? — to this place, which is Elsewhere, Conley seemingly wants to take it all back. In an afterward he declares that the standards of proof of his “day job” as sociologist, “falsifiable hypotheses, experimental methods, and the like,” cannot be applied to the argument(s) he makes here. He claims that he is engaging in “social criticism,” whose only support is the reader’s belief in his plausibility. As he says, “In short, do I make sense?” In short, no.